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<h1>Best practices: Designing effective documents and dashboards</h1>
<p>Before you create a document or dashboard, you need to gather information 
 from your user community, your project designer, your database administrator, 
 and your MicroStrategy software. The following best practices are described 
 here:</p>
<ul type="disc" class="whs1">
	
<li class=p><p>
<a href="#Gathering_information_about_your_user_audience">Gathering 
 information about your user audience</a></p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>
<a href="#Gathering_information_about_your_data_source">Gathering 
 information about your data source</a></p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>
<a href="#Gathering_information_about_your_MicroStrategy_project">Gathering 
 information about your MicroStrategy project</a></p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>
<a href="#Taking_advantage_of_time_savers">Taking advantage 
 of time savers</a></p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>
<a href="#Designing_the_document_or_dashboard">Designing 
 the document or dashboard</a></p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>
<a href="#Designing_documents_for_Excel">Designing documents 
 for Excel</a></p></li>
</ul>
<h2>
<a name=Gathering_information_about_your_user_audience></a>Gathering 
 information about your user audience</h2>
<p>Ask yourself who the audience is for the document you plan to create. 
 Questions you should have answers to include:</p>
<ul type="disc" class="whs1">
	
<li class=p><p>What is the main topic area the document needs to address? 
 In other words, at a general level, what do users need to know?</p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>What level of detail do users need? For example, sometimes 
 executive level users only want to see a few key metrics of certain data. 
 Other analysts may need to see very detailed financial numbers or inventory 
 counts.</p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>What types of documents do users expect? Higher level 
 executives sometimes have expectations about how data is displayed in 
 a document, so it can be helpful to ask what types of documents they are 
 used to receiving and whether it is important to try to adhere to that 
 data display style. </p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>Who is your universe of users made up of? </p></li>
	<ul type="square" class="whs2">
		
<li class=p><p>If your universe of users is extremely diverse, 
 consider making documents as flexible as possible for each user who executes 
 them, by adding prompts. A prompt asks users questions about the results 
 they want to see on a document, and then submits the appropriate query 
 to the data source. For an introduction to prompts, see the <span style="font-style: italic;"><I>MicroStrategy 
 Basic Reporting Guide</I></span>.</p></li>
		
<li class=p><p>Your universe of users may include different security 
 requirements. For example, you may need a single document for a group 
 of users, but that group includes both external and internal users, and 
 you want to restrict some data from external view. You must confirm that 
 appropriate security is in place for a document’s underlying objects, 
 and that security filters are in place to control row-level access to 
 data. Object-level security is performed using ACLs (access control lists.)</p></li>
	</ul>
</ul>
<p class="whs3">Security filters and ACLs are generally implemented 
 by your system administrator, but one or both may be under the control 
 of your project designer. For details on security filters, ACLs, and other 
 security features, see the <span style="font-style: italic;"><I>MicroStrategy 
 System Administration Guide</I></span>. </p>
<h2>
<a name=Gathering_information_about_your_data_source></a>Gathering 
 information about your data source</h2>
<p>If you need an introduction to or refresher on data sources, see the 
 <span style="font-style: italic;"><I>MicroStrategy Basic Reporting Guide</I></span>.</p>
<p>Make sure the data your organization stores can support the information 
 your users want to analyze in a reporting environment. Questions you should 
 ask include:</p>
<ul type="disc" class="whs1">
	
<li class=p><p>Does your organization gather the data that users want 
 to see documents on?</p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>Is your data organized in such a way that it can be 
 used? Is the data reliable, and is it clean? One way to check on the reliability 
 of your data is to create some simple grid reports designed to validate 
 whether your data reflects your understanding of reality. </p></li>
</ul>
<p class="whs4">For example, if you have a good sense of 
 how many customers own two or three of your organization’s products, create 
 a report that shows basic data on the count of customers who purchased 
 those specific products over the past few years. If the numbers you see 
 in the report do not come close to what you expected to see, it is worthwhile 
 to spend some time with your database administrator to address the reliability 
 of the data stored in your data source.</p>
<h2>
<a name=Gathering_information_about_your_MicroStrategy_project></a>Gathering 
 information about your MicroStrategy project</h2>
<p>Many of the objects within a project are generally created by the project’s 
 designer when the project is first created. Since you use these objects 
 to design datasets for documents, it can be useful to understand your 
 project’s design, and specifically how the project’s objects reflect the 
 actual data in your organization’s data source. In this way, you can choose 
 objects to use in datasets with full knowledge of the data source tables 
 that data is coming from when the document is executed. </p>
<p>For details on general project design and data modeling, see the <span 
 style="font-style: italic;"><I>MicroStrategy Project Design Guide</I></span>. 
 </p>
<p>Questions you should ask about your project include:</p>
<ul type="disc" class="whs1">
	
<li class=p><p>Do objects exist in the MicroStrategy metadata which 
 match what users want to see on documents? If not, a document designer 
 can create them. </p></li>
</ul>
<p class="whs4">MicroStrategy provides flexibility in combining 
 information from your data source into specific objects which reflect 
 the concepts that make sense to your users. Consolidations and custom 
 groups are just two examples of ways you can present data to your users 
 in a way that does not directly reflect your data source’s storage structure. 
 For an introduction to consolidations and custom groups, see the<span 
 style="font-style: italic;"><I> MicroStrategy Advanced Reporting Guide</I></span>. 
 </p>
<ul type="disc" class="whs1">
	
<li class=p><p>What VLDB (Very Large Database) properties have been 
 set? These settings affect how the SQL is written when a document sends 
 a SQL query to your data source. VLDB properties are usually determined 
 by an administrator, but some may also be defined by a project’s designer. 
 All VLDB properties are described in detail in the <span style="font-style: italic;"><I>MicroStrategy 
 System Administration Guide.</I></span></p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>What project configuration settings have been set that 
 will affect reports or documents? Ask your project designer about any 
 configuration settings made for the project as a whole, because most reports 
 and report objects revert to the project’s settings when no object-specific 
 or report-specific settings override them.</p></li>
</ul>
<h2>
<a name=Taking_advantage_of_time_savers></a>Taking advantage of time-savers</h2>
<ul type="disc" class="whs1">
	
<li class=p><p class="whs5">Before you create a document, 
 search through MicroStrategy to see whether a similar document already 
 exists that can serve the same purpose as the document you intend to create. 
 This can save you time and help you avoid unnecessary duplication in your 
 MicroStrategy metadata.</p></li>
	
<li class=p><p class="whs5">Before you create the finished 
 document, use Microsoft Excel, Paint, PowerPoint, or another tool to create 
 a mock-up of the document you intend to design. Send the mock-up to your 
 user community to gather their feedback on its usefulness. This can save 
 you valuable time creating a complex, finished document that may have 
 to be redone.</p></li>
	
<li class=p><p class="whs5">You can select multiple controls 
 on a document so that you can perform an action on all of them, such as 
 formatting, aligning, or sizing. To select multiple controls, press and 
 hold <span style="font-weight: bold;"><B>CTRL</B></span> while you click each 
 control. </p></li>
</ul>
<h2>
<a name=Designing_the_document_or_dashboard></a>Designing the document 
 or dashboard</h2>
<ul type="disc" class="whs1">
	
<li class=p><p>Hide unused document sections (by collapsing the section 
 on the template) so that the template is easier to work with. See 
<a href="Hiding_and_displaying_sections.htm">Hiding 
 and displaying sections</a>.</p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>Use the grouping feature to minimize the amount of data 
 passed between the web server and the browser. This is useful because 
 documents do not use incremental fetch to return data from the server. 
 See 
<a href="Grouping_data.htm">Grouping records in a document</a>.</p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>Determine whether the dataset(s) will return a large 
 amount of data. If so, consider adding grouping to the document by choosing 
 which attributes you want to group the pages by. See 
<a href="Grouping_data.htm">Grouping 
 records in a document</a>.</p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>Make the following decisions as you are planning the 
 design of your document, not after you are finished: </p></li>
	<ul type="square" class="whs2">
		
<li class=p><p>Determine the logic for page breaks. See 
<a href="Add_page_breaks_to_document.htm">Adding 
 page breaks to a document</a>.</p></li>
		
<li class=p><p>Decide what export options you will enable for users 
 of this document. See 
<a href="Export_a_document.htm">Exporting a document</a>.</p></li>
		
<li class=p><p>Decide whether you need landscape or vertical orientation 
 to best display the data you want to include. See 
<a href="Modifying_page_setup_options.htm">Modifying 
 page setup options</a>.</p></li>
		
<li class=p><p>If the document will be viewed in PDF, be sure to 
 include bookmarks. See 
<a HREF="Including_bookmarks_in_PDFs.htm">Including 
 bookmarks in PDFs</a>.</p></li>
	</ul>
	
<li class=p><p>Do not include so many graphical objects that the data 
 becomes unimportant. Make sure the data is the main focus of the document. 
 The overall goal is to achieve a clean look.</p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>Plan your design so that all related data can be seen 
 on a single screen or page, and that it can be interpreted from the top 
 left to the bottom right.</p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>Save your document frequently as you design and make 
 formatting changes to it.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>For additional best practices when designing a dashboard and when using 
 effects and widgets, see 
<a HREF="Best_practices_for_dashboards.htm">Best 
 practices: Designing effective dashboards</a>.</p>
<h2>
<a name=Designing_documents_for_Excel></a>Designing documents for Excel</h2>
<p>Use the following best practices to ensure that your document will be 
 displayed correctly when exported to Microsoft Excel. For information 
 on how to make export modes available for a document, see 
<a HREF="Defining_available_display_modes.htm">Defining 
 which display modes are available to users</a>.</p>
<ul type="disc" class="whs1">
	
<li class=p><p>Choose Excel-compatible colors for all objects, including 
 panels, shapes, and Grid/Graphs. Use the set of 40 colors that appear 
 in MicroStrategy Web's Advanced Color Picker. Excel supports these 40 
 colors in addition to many more. Other colors in MicroStrategy are matched 
 by Microsoft Excel as closely as possible. </p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>Use graph styles that are supported by Microsoft Excel. 
 For example, if you include a Gauge graph in the document, it is not displayed 
 in Excel. If you include a Combination graph, the exported version in 
 Excel may not be displayed exactly like the original graph in MicroStrategy 
 Web. </p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>Avoid overlapping objects. When exported, the document 
 may not be displayed correctly. For example, an object in the background 
 of the document may be displayed in the foreground of the Excel spreadsheet. 
 </p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>Provide extra space around objects because they may 
 increase in size when the document is exported to Excel. </p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>Use text field borders to create line and rectangles. 
 Standard MicroStrategy line and rectangle controls may not be displayed 
 correctly in Excel. </p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>Avoid inserting line breaks within text fields. Line 
 breaks (inserted by typing Ctrl+Enter) are not rendered in Excel.</p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>Do not enable word-wrapping in a column header on a 
 Grid/Graph in MicroStrategy. If you do so, the headers are not displayed 
 correctly in Excel or PDF. Enable word-wrapping in Excel after you export 
 the document.</p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>Use an absolute file path to define the location of 
 an image used in a document. Do not use a relative file path. Images in 
 documents specified with paths relative to MicroStrategy Web and Intelligence 
 Server are not displayed when exported to Excel. </p></li>
</ul>
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